How Important is Food Safety?

Well, is food safety important to you? It certainly is for me and I’m wondering why it is taking so long for us to see any results from the Food Safety Modernization Act that President Obama signed into law two years ago. There seems to have been a lack of noticeable activity since then.

Finally, there does seem to be a little activity – on Wednesday, January 16th, the FDA intends to publish some new proposed rules, one being called “Standards for the Growing, Harvesting, Packing, and Holding of Produce for Human Consumption”.

You can get a copy in PDF format from this link. (Interesting that the FDA uses Amazon, rather than its own servers to host files like this).

As is usual with proposed rules, there will be a period of time when interested parties can comment and make suggestions – hopefully something that works will come out of this process.

One thing interesting to those in our industry is that traceability is mentioned several times (traceforward and traceback) – I think this will fit in well with the Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI) that has been launched by stakeholders in the produce supply chain – We have already produced some PTI resources over the last couple of years.

Hopefully the new FDA proposed rules will give the PTI a needed boost in momentum.

What are your thoughts on traceability for produce? If you work in the food supply chain, do you see these proposed rules changing your processes?